Does Braintree eliminate the need for a merchant account, with all the complexity that entails? Do they offer a developer API that's super-friendly to write for, allowing for weird use cases like processing payments from native BlackBerry apps without exposing you to PCI requirements or risks of publicly exposing your API keys by shipping them in apps?[1] And most importantly, is it a piece of cake to communicate directly with Braintree's founders?
'Cause that's what I've seen so far from Stripe. They're incredibly responsive and helpful. They even changed their SSL cert provider for me because older BlackBerries had a rough time with their prior cert provider.
Not to rag on Braintree, they've sounded like a good choice for a long time, but Stripe's changing some of the rules of the game. Killing the need for a merchant account is a really big deal and I'm happy to pay their rate.
[1] This isn't a rhetorical question, actually. I'd be interested in whether you can do this with Braintree.
Braintree's API is crazy simple. You can do pretty much anything you need with a single call to a well-designed endpoint using a sane object model. They have working client libraries for pretty much every tech too.
All designed and written in the last few years, and thus completely free of legacy insanity from the 70s.
You need your own Merchant Account though. They'll find you a provider if you need one.
I can't speak to Braintree because we don't use them. I do believe that they will set up a merchant account for you as a proxy or agent, IIRC.
But I can speak to the economics of all this "complexity" of which you speak.
We currently use CyberSource for our gateway and associated banks for our Merchant Accounts, and we maintain several accounts. Each account takes less than a day to set up, with our representatives at each company.
Integrating with the CyberSource API takes roughly 20 developer-hours.
An increase in transaction costs to 5%+0.30, would cost us roughly the salary+benefits+taxes+overhead of two fulltime developers, per year. That's a cost that's simply unacceptable.
There is also the issue of "killing the need for a merchant account", being problematic from a number of legal/accounting angles( tracing this transaction from A to M, entity separation and identifcation ), as well as customer service angles( what is this PAYCSTRIPE_TCMERCH charge on my card?? ).
You've got what's called a nice problem to have. At that rate you must be charging many millions per year, so sure, it's all about minimizing your fees. But for those of us with much smaller-to-nonexistent revenues, wondering whether our app will even make money at all, Stripe makes all kinds of sense and is a prefect place to start.
Stripe is quite literally double Braintree's rates, with no value-add.
And on top of that, they hold the float for up to thirty days?
Good luck, guys. You're going to need it.